Trailer Trash

It seemed as though we had survived a dark time, and made it safely to the other side, when roughly two minutes and twenty seconds of the new “Star Trek” trailer had elapsed without the appearance of a certain ear-splitting and maddeningly ubiquitous action-movie-trailer musical cue. And then, about eight seconds from the finish, there it was: “duhhhhn,” that low and loud synthesized hum—ominous and brain-addling. (Click here for repeated torture.) And although another big-effects thrill ride had been promised in the single deep note, hope for a better today was dashed.

By now, this accursed bass drone feels as if it has always been a part of our cinematic lives. Yet its reign of sonic terror has been relatively brief, dating, with a fewantecedents, to a string of trailers made for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” from 2010. The teaser for the film was released in 2009, and featured music by Mike Zarin. The movie’s third trailer, this time scored by Zach Hemsey, added a playful and clever string element over Zarin’s big booms. Both of these components were then absorbed into the film’s soundtrack, by Hans Zimmer, a composer who, based largely on his work on Nolan’s films in the past decade, probably deserves most of the blame for loosing this particular rock slide into the world. (He’s responsible for other musical crimes as well, including what Dave Ross, writing for Salon in 2004, identified as “the vaguely ethnic wail”: soaring female vocals that gave instant epic credibility to a series of movies beginning with “Gladiator,” in 2000, and extending to a variety of lesser versions in the years that followed.)

Trailer tropes reflect the eras in which they thrive. In the nineteen-fifties, bold titles promising action and adventure flashed across the screen, paired with breathless and earnest news-reel-style narration that exhorted viewers to get to the theatre fast or miss out on a kind of shared-cultural event—à la this trailer for “The African Queen.” Skip ahead to the seventies, a more jaded and circumspect era at the movies, and you find trailers stripped down to their essentials, with plots offered up to audiences by grim and plainspoken voices. The teaser for “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) gives it to us straight: “Of the fourteen hundred people on board, only a handful will survive. This is their story.” “This is a world of hidden mics and two-way mirrors—a world where nothing is private” begins the trailer for “The Conversation” (1974), in one of the best-ever two-minute distillations of an entire film. And later that decade, there is the apotheosis of the genre, for “The China Syndrome” (1979):

And then there were nineteen-eighties and early nineties—that time of slick, soulless marketing and high-frequency synthesizers. This period saw the rise of the baritone voice-over stars. We may not have known the names of Don LaFontaine and his ilk, but we knew their voices—and all that they promised: bluster and bombast peppered with puns and other demi-clever turns of phrase that became dated the moment they blasted from the speakers of your local multiplex: “This time, there are two! Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day.’ ” Or: “He’s an easy guy to like, and a hard man to kill.”

Twenty-five years later, the trailer for the latest “Die Hard” movie ditched the high-spirited schtick, and instead featured the dreadful low hum, reflecting its new place among the grim action movies of our time. (Thankfully, it also incorporated “Ode to Joy,” the franchise having retained a glimmer of its sense of humor.) The silly voice-overs of the past, meanwhile, have mostly been banished to the ghettos of sitcom television and animated fare. Today’s action movies—with pretensions to deep-thinking, and filled with rueful and angry superheroes or geopolitical conflicts that attempt to mirror the fragmented realities of the War on Terror world—demand a more serious treatment, and those thunderous musical cues seem handed down to remind us that even frivolous popcorn movies aren’t supposed to merely be fun anymore. The trailer has been elevated to a minor art form unto itself, and the auteurs behind them seem to have little patience for the gimmicks of the past. Yet one day, hopefully soon, the “duhhhhn” will be gone, abandoned for the next trailer innovation, and will be remembered as a kind of dated sonic cheese. It may come to seem as absurd as the idea of an eighties-style “Inception” trailer: “If you want to hide top-secret corporate information from these guys, you better not fall asleep. This summer, Leonardo DiCaprio is turning the world upside down in this non-stop thrill ride. ‘Inception’: Life is but a dream.” Or as incongruous as an eighties movie trailer backed by the bass drone:

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.